He wrote backend code that half a billion people tapped through every morning. Then he walked away to fix the most dreaded calendar invite in corporate life: the team offsite.
Nick Freeman runs the engineering and, lately, half the executive office of Marco Experiences, the company that wants to retire the spreadsheet from which most corporate retreats are born. Marco helps more than 800 companies - Meta, Bain and Netflix among them - discover, plan and book offsites, retreats and group experiences. The product range runs from "Instant Offsites," where a planner can grab hotel rooms, meeting space and on-property dining at group rates, to "Offsites Pro," a full-service plan-it-all engagement with a dedicated human and software to wrangle itineraries, budgets and vendors.
It is a deeply unglamorous problem dressed up as a glamorous one. Somebody has to chase the catering contract. Somebody has to know the venue's cancellation policy. Freeman's bet is that the somebody should be software with a person on top - and that, done right, the logistics disappear and the connection is what's left.
Nearly every founding myth gets sanded down into something tidy. This one keeps its rough edge. Suman Siva - the future co-CEO - messaged Nick on his way to a Rufus Du Sol show. A coffee in San Francisco followed. By the end of it, the pitch had done its work: Freeman would leave his job and build something in the experiences space.
There was no grand plan, only a framework. Siva borrowed Jeff Bezos's regret-minimization test - when I'm 80, will I regret not doing this? - and the answer was loud enough to act on. What began as a side project became a company. What began as a consumer idea (a friendlier Facebook Events) pivoted to virtual events, and then, when the pandemic turned every team remote, to the business that stuck: B2B experiences.
The experiences marketplace was worth an estimated $183 billion in 2020 and had no obvious leader, least of all in the business channel. That gap was the whole thesis. Early customers rated the product an NPS of 46; more than 80% said they'd had a meaningful team moment, and the team pulled off a 500-person virtual holiday party for Bain across three offices in its first year.
By December 2020 - Marco's debut year - annualized net revenue had reached roughly $800,000, with clients including Salesforce and Microsoft. Not bad for a company that had pivoted its way into existence.
Software engineer building a scalable Scala backend and a web-scraper service.
Designed and built Cortana for Xbox One. Voice in the living room, before it was everywhere.
Senior software engineer. Worked on the Explore redesign and the product that would define the era.
A founding backend engineer, scaling Stories from launch toward 500M daily active users.
Senior software engineer at the fintech rocket, the last stop before founding.
Co-founded with Suman Siva. Co-CEO and CTO. The side project becomes the main thing.
Marco raised a single $2.87M seed round, backed by investors including Singularity Capital, Potluck Ventures and Litquidity. Lean by design - the kind of capital that buys runway to find product-market fit, not a marketing blitz.
The company where he built Stories now buys experiences from the company he built.
That 500-person, three-office virtual party? This client.
Among the 800+ names on the customer list.
He calls himself a sneakerhead and notes he's "been called a hypebeast." Few CTOs volunteer that in their bio.
An outdoor adventurer away from the keyboard. The product is about getting people out of the office; so is the founder.
He built Cortana for the living room before he built software for the conference room.
A UC Berkeley grad who studied both computer science and economics - the engineer who also reads the market.
There's a tidy irony in the arc. Freeman spent his prime engineering years making it easier for people to connect from a phone, alone, a thumb away from anyone. Stories was intimacy at scale, mediated by a screen. Marco is the inverse instinct - get the team in a room, on a trail, around a table - and use the screen only to make the getting-there painless.
It would be easy to read that as a rejection of the work that made him. It reads more like a sequel. The same conviction runs through both: that software, pointed at the right human moment, can do more than capture attention. It can build something that lasts past the notification. Marco is the wager that the most valuable thing technology can schedule is presence.
Sources: LinkedIn, The Org, Crunchbase, and the Marco Experiences company blog. Figures (funding, revenue, customer counts, NPS) reflect publicly reported information at the time of publication and may have changed.